We are now working with the University of Chicago Press to launch a new journal, Man and the Economy. We chose our title carefully to signal the mission of the new journal, which is to restore economics to a study of man as he is and of the economy as it actually exists. We hope this new journal will provide a platform to encourage scholars all over the world to study how the economy works in their countries. We believe this is the only way to make progress in economics.

I am certain all these commenters are indignant at all the recent flood of academic papers that use “she” as the general pronoun when discussing random individuals. I’m sure they’re equally incensed that men are excluded by these articles and work hard to lobby the major academic journals to stop these discriminatory practices.

But apparently it is. As the new journal’s editors note: “We chose our title carefully to signal the mission of the new journal, which is to restore economics to a study of man as he is and of the economy as it actually exists.”

Isn’t about time that we started approaching the economy as a system that serves the needs of humankind rather than this darwinian entity that has a mind of its own. Our founding fathers did it with government, why cannot we do the same? Ours certainly does not serve anyone it seems to me.

My complaint with the title has nothing to do with the gender bias but the unclear connection between the two objects. Maybe “Our Economy” would make their point more clearly. I understand an economy to be the complex sum of human actions and interactions (past, present, and future). Sure the sum can be greater than the parts (woo hoo macro), but it is not an independent “it.” Alternately the economic equivalent of “Musician and the Concert” might do the trick. Maybe this meaning in the title is clear to the authors, but it needs to be clear to the audience too. What makes me really scratch my head though is that I was under the impression that several economic journals were already interested in “how the economy works.” Learn something here everyday.

I went through some issues of JEL, Journal of Economic Perspectives and JPE. All of them deal with issues of importance to people … or to “Man” . It is claimed that the new journal will study the economy as it “actually exists”. But The Real World Economic Review already claims to do that. Moreover, there is a methodological problem in the claim about studying something as it really exists since we perceive the economy through a paradigm. The different schools of thought differ about “what actually exists” in the economy. So do the editors mean they will study what actually exists according to their paradigm? Or will the journal be a forum for diverse viewpoints?

If I understand it well, it means you want to take economy back from the world of mathematical equations to the social science sphere. Well, that sounds pretty well, because as we can see, theory of the Economy is not working in the real life, because it is constantly treating human beings as a rationally thinking individuals who behave only in order with their incentives, which are not well defined. We have to understand, that current economy is just a fight between low taxes-high taxes. Each one of the concepts is correct if you implement him well. But they both try to avoid the human factor in the play. The institutions are not well designed and it produces more and more confusion. The current fight against the global economic crisis is just one example of this problem.